Currying

gga

As a lazy functional language Haskell has to
provide automatic currying of all functions. But once you’ve tried to
use a functional language that doesn’t automatically curry you realise
this isn’t just an implementation detail, it’s a useful technique for
concisely implementing programs.

but before describing how currying helps, what is it? Currying is a
concept from the analysis of mathematical functions. Say, you have a
function f(a, b), that takes two parameters and returns a
value. Currying reduces this to two functions: one that takes the
other parameter and returns the original value.

That is, currying reduces functions parameter-by-parameter into other
functions - these new functions each take one less parameter, but
return a function, instead of a value, that then takes the remaining
parameters.

For example: f(a, b) = a + 2b. If this were curried with respect to
a = 5, b = 10, then the function would be reduced as follows:

f(5, b) = 5 + 2b
= f(b)
f(10) = 5 + 2 x 10
= 25

And hopefully you noticed that halfway through that evaluation we
found a function over b which had already had a value substituted
in for a. This, by the way, is also an example of partial
evaluation. In fact, it’s more an example of partial evaluation than
currying, as currying does not require values for function
parameters.

Anyway, that’s a brief introduction to currying in maths, but I’m not
a mathematician so for some more (accurate) information try reading up
on combinatory
logic.

So, how does currying exhibit in Haskell? Function application is
treated as a special operation, distinct from calling a
function. Functions are applied from left to right, to the first
parameter, producing a new function that is applied to the second
parameter and so on. A Haskell function call like:

f 1 10 "Hello"

is evaluated as if it’s parenthesised like:

((f 1) 10) "Hello"

If working from left to right each additional expression produces a
new valid expression, then does that mean we can leave off an
arbitrary number of of expressions from the right and still have a
valid expression? Yes, that’s precisely true. In fact that would
actually be a function which could then be given a name and provided
with any number of values.

And this is where currying really comes in use for expressing
code. Using the right functions and operations you can typically
define your own functions without naming any parameters.

In particular, this dramatically reduces the number of anonymous
functions you need to declare. As opposed to Scheme, they become quite
rare.

Of course, in the languages’ standard libraries these functions are
defined quite differently (Haskell’s is only one line…) But this is
useful as those are equivalent implementations - Haskell’s is shorter
only because it automatically curries.

Finally, currying is required in Haskell because it’s a lazy
language. The currying produces a train of anonymous functions - each
retained as a value. Arriving at a result when required is simply
achieved by evaluating those retained anonymous function values. But
only the minimum set that are actually required.

Understanding currying and being able to curry your own functions in
your head is a fundamental step to ‘getting’ functional programming.